


Mistakes were Made

by Cards_Slash



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Humor, M/M, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:08:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22243114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: None of it would have happened if only Aziraphale hadn't been so pushy in that coat closet.  Crowley could hardly be blamed for how things turned out.  And for that matter, there was no point in concentrating on the past when there was a devilishly angelic creature growing in his gut.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 79





	Mistakes were Made

**Author's Note:**

> This story uses the "Adam accidentally gave Aziraphale an anatomically correct male body when he separated him from Madame Tracy" I used first in [Life in the Fast Lane](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19716289/chapters/46660546)

“Angel,” Crowley said. It was his fault for putting it off so long; he knew that. There were reasons (or at very least there were excuses) like: it wasn’t the sort of news that you gave a man over the phone. It had been raining and Crowley didn’t like going out in the cold. Aziraphale was reading and it seemed like a shame to interrupt him while he was reading. 

So on, and so forth.

Crowley  _ had _ been putting it off. He’d answered the phone and he hadn’t said it. He’d driven them to dinner, and he hadn’t said it. He’d sat through appetizers, two main courses, desserts,  _ and _ coffee and he hadn’t said anything. He’d driven them to the bookshop and said nothing. He’d followed Aziraphale to the door, because that was the sort of thing they did after a lovely dinner, and he said nothing. 

Hell, Crowley had let himself be guided up the stairs to the bedroom and stripped naked from the waist up and the only thing he’d managed to say in all that time was a series of encouraging vowels. He’d said things like,  _ take this damn coat off _ and  _ why do you have so many layers on _ . But he hadn’t said  _ it _ , the thing, the one thing he needed to say.

No, he’d let Aziraphale drop him on the bed and strip his long-long skinny jeans off, and he said nothing. He’d been propped up on his elbows, smiling at the foolish pink delight on his angel’s face and he’d kept his mouth shut. And Aziraphale had whispered his adoration for Crowley’s legs, he’d tiptoed his fingers up to his thighs and pulled them apart with the most sincere sound of delighted anticipation ever uttered. 

Aziraphale said, “oh, I didn’t suspect, what a lovely surprise.” The angel didn’t care at all if Crowley had a cock or a vagina. He hadn’t ever cared, as long as they were doing this, but there was a certain kind of eyebrow raise he did when there was a vagina and no breasts to compliment them. He never said anything, and it never seemed to change how they enjoyed one another, but it was always there. “Was it a last minute decision?” Aziraphale asked.

Crowley stared down between his spread legs, and he thought, he _ really _ thought the only decent thing to do would be to tell the truth. He could just blurt it right out and get it over with. “No,” he said.

If Aziraphale had some reason for asking (and he did), it wasn’t worth sharing. Rather than worry over the particulars of why Crowley had a vagina, he set straight to work worshipping it. He was a greedy,  _ hungry _ angel, always willing to put new and potentially tasty things into his mouth. He applied all that ravenous, endless appetite to sex and only someone ignorant or stupid would ever have given him a reason not to. 

_ Yes _ , Crowley did need to tell.  _ Yes _ , it was important. It was just that it could wait until after.

Of course,  _ after _ was a relative term because Crowley was a puddle of nerve endings on the bed when Aziraphale finally crawled up from between his legs. His mouth and chin and neck were soaked and his smile was  _ feral _ . His body was a steady weight keeping them both in place, and he paused just before the head of his cock could push  _ in _ . “My dear,” he said with sticky fingers resting sweetly around Crowley’s arm, “may I?”

“Of course,” Crowley had said. It was the same answer he’d always given. It was the answer he always meant to give. It was an answer that had never once been questioned. He quite enjoyed being properly ravished. 

The trouble was that Crowley really did need to tell Aziraphale. He should have told him before this moment, and he hadn’t, and that was his fault. He could have waited until they were finished but he had known the angel long enough to know that he really had to say  _ something _ . “Angel,” he finally said. It was hard to say anything with the increasing urgency of the thrusts.

“One moment,” Aziraphale said to his neck.

“This is important,” Crowley gasped. He wrapped his legs around him and hooked his feet together. It didn’t give him enough leverage to stop the angel but it slowed him down enough that talking was easier. “I’m pregnant,” he said when Aziraphale looked up at him.

“That’s impossible,” Aziraphale said. He’d been resting his weight on his elbows but he straightened his arms so he could peer down between them at Crowley’s stomach as if it would prove him right. “You can’t be pregnant. You don’t do all the inside parts.  _ You _ said as much.”

No, usually Crowley didn’t bother with all the inside bits because it wasn’t like they were of any use to him. “I was in a hurry,” he said.

“A hurry?” Aziraphale repeated. He leaned back, one hand on the bed and the other going between them to grip at his cock as he pulled out. Once he was free he sat back on his knees to properly stare at Crowley’s body with uneasy suspicion.

“Yes, remember the coat closet at—” Oh it was the place with that name, the funny name and the waitress that reminded him of an oyster and always cooed when she saw Aziraphale. It was something funny, the name. “Remember? You were very insistent that we not wait until we get home? I only had a few minutes to do anything, and I wasn’t thinking.”

“You  _ can’t _ be pregnant,” Aziraphale repeated. “You  _ can’t _ . Demons don’t have babies.”

“Satan had a baby, lovely boy, named Adam. I think you met him.”

Aziraphale scoffed. He slid back off the bed so he could stand there fretting with his hands together, looking entirely ridiculous without a stitch of clothing on. His cock hadn’t even gotten soft yet, it was just jutting out while he looked steadily more horrified by the conversation. “That’s  _ Satan _ . He’s not—he’s not a real demon. And he’s a  _ man _ , he didn’t get pregnant.” That was all bullshit. None of them knew where Satan got the baby from because it was impolite to ask. “And I’m an _ angel _ .”

“An angel with a cock,” Crowley said. He rocked forward so he was sitting up on the bed, legs crossed in front of him and hands in his lap. 

“Angels  _ don’t have _ babies.”

Crowley rolled his eyes, “that’s because angels don’t have  _ sex _ , not because you  _ can’t _ . Besides, as we’ve thoroughly proved, you have semen and any creature with a cock and  _ semen _ can be a father.” (Or something like that. Basic biology wasn’t something Crowley concerned himself with. He’d learned what he needed to learn and a few things he didn’t like knowing but that’s where he stopped.) 

“You’re not pregnant!” Aziraphale shouted.

It was going as well as Crowley had thought it would go. (Actually, Aziraphale was still there, and therefore it was going better than he’d thought it would go.) “Look,” he scooted forward across the wet patch to the edge of the bed. 

Aziraphale took a step back from him, like he was being attacked. “I’m not sure what sort of trick you are playing,” he said hopefully. “It’s not very funny.”

Crowley didn’t stand up because that might really have been the last straw that sent the angel running. No, he motioned at his belly instead, “come on,” he said, “you can sense it if you try.”

Aziraphale had faced Satan with less fear. His fingers were knitted together in a great knot, his face was caught up in an agony he’d never experienced before, and he kept casting quick-longing glances at the door. “You can’t be,” he repeated. But he did shuffle a step forward, he did reach out his hand. He pressed it slowly,  _ carefully _ against Crowley’s stomach. His eyes closed; he stopped breathing. “ _ Oh _ .”

Yes.  _ Oh _ indeed. Because that little thing that had latched its claws into Crowley’s body felt exactly like Aziraphale. It was a bright knot of  _ pure _ love. “Yeah,” he said.

As soon as the moment came, it was gone again. Aziraphale couldn’t deny what he’d felt himself, so he stormed on to the next objectionable fact. He jerked backward, drawn up like an angry peacock to exclaim: “you should have told me!”

“Yes, well—”

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me! I can’t believe you let me— You,” Aziraphale was stuttering over phrasing, “you let me put my—” They could have been here for an eternity waiting for Aziraphale to find a word.

“Cock?” Crowley said for him.

“Yes!” Aziraphale shouted. “You let me put my—”

“Cock,” Crowley repeated.

“In you! While you were pregnant! You let me— There’s a child in there!”

This was the exact reason that he hadn’t told the angel. This was the exact conversation he knew they were going to have, the only one that he wanted to avoid. Now he was having it, while naked, with an equally naked angel, and he wasn’t enjoying it. “There’s  _ something _ ,” Crowley said, “we don’t know what it is. I don’t think we should be labeling it anything.”

“It’s a  _ child _ ,” Aziraphale said. “What else would it be?”

“I don’t know. You don’t either.” He waited a moment, let Aziraphale work through this new layer of outrage. And once the angel was at the height of his ability to imagine catastrophe, Crowley said (like it wasn’t important at all): “so we should finish having sex.”

“What?” Aziraphale demanded. “We are not! I’m not—there’s a  _ child _ in there. I’m not—” Just like that he waved his hand and dressed himself in a series of defensive layers. The only miracle involved was the fact that the clothes were the usual ones and not some shiny armor from the days of the round table. “I need a drink,” he said.

Crowley sighed as he watched Aziraphale storm out of the room. All in all, it was much better than he’d imagined.

\--

Aziraphale was not returning Crowley’s calls. It might have been childish but he was willing to behave like an adolescent if it proved a point. Maybe it had been alright to go around withholding vital information from one another before they averted an apocalypse together but things were different now!

Even a demon ought to have known that.

And never mind being a demon, Crowley had been the one that had gone on about how they were on their own side now! 

They couldn’t very well be on their own side if one of them went around forgetting to mention that he was pregnant until the very last possible moment. Although, after a bit of research, Aziraphale did have to admit that sex with a pregnant person was not dangerous to anyone. There was still a principle to defend, and that principle was that Crowley should have told him. 

“Come on, angel!” Crowley was shouting through the front door of his very obviously closed bookshop. He was banging the flat of his hand against the windows with his cheek pressed up against it so closely his glasses were askew. “I very nearly said I was sorry!”

It was harder to ignore the demon in person but that didn’t mean that Aziraphale couldn’t do it. He’d made himself a steaming hot cup of cocoa and he’d amassed a small collection of novels he had been meaning to reread for some time. (Aziraphale did not necessarily enjoy rereading things. There was a thrill to reading something once. It was a rare book that deserved being read twice.)

He licked his fingers with great purpose as he prepared to turn the page on the very first book and just before he could, there was the faintest smell of heat-baked rocks and there stood Crowley looking very annoyed to have used a miracle to get himself inside. “Really, angel?”

“I am not,” Aziraphale said in a clear, authoritative tone, “speaking to you.”

“Not speaking to me,” Crowley repeated to a coat rack standing next to him. “Not speaking to me? We’re not children, angel! Come on, you can’t just not speak to me.”

Aziraphale set his attention on the first word of the novel he was planning to read and therefore had absolutely none to spare on the demon that was almost certainly going to be having a temper tantrum just next to him.

\--

“It’s your spawn too!” Crowley shouted from the couch. He hadn’t meant to collapse but hours of scheming and shouting and being utterly ignored would have exhausted anybody. Nevermind somebody that had a thing growing inside of them. (A thing, one might add, that was so like its father that it made Crowley crave sweets and gave him great bubbles of gas that could only be described as demonic indigestion. His body wasn’t designed to encase something angelic.) “I know what I’ll do,” he mumbled at the ceiling as exhaustion dragged his limbs into a curl, “I’ll burn the whole shop down. You’ll have to move then. All the books on fire--I’ve been in a bookshop on fire. It’s very hard to sit still when everything’s on fire around you. And I’m a demon, I’m very used to fire.”

There was more mumbling to do, and he might have done more, but he couldn’t swear that he remembered it.

The very next thing that he remembered was waking up on the couch with a start, covered by a very nice, very warm blanket, to find Aziraphale sitting next to him sipping cocoa out of a cup. The angel had the distinct look of smugness on his face. It filled up his round cheeks and made him insufferable. 

“What?” Crowley demanded.

“I made you cocoa.”

“I don’t want  _ cocoa _ .” It wasn’t even a lie as he said it. Crowley did not want cocoa. (He wasn’t opposed to nice warm drink at times, but he refused on principle to drink anything that smelled like pure happiness.) Still, he picked up the mug he was given and held it to his face.

The wriggling spawn in his gut very much liked the smell of cocoa. It was hard to describe exactly how the spawn was conveying this thought. It wasn’t words, and it wasn’t motion, and all the same it was perfectly clear that the spawn wanted Crowley to drink cocoa. 

“I suppose you can feel it too,” Crowley said while glowering at the positively stomach churning sweetness in the cup.

Aziraphale’s answer was widening smile and a quick joyful wiggle. 

“I hope you’re very proud. It’s not even born and it’s already taking after you.” He sipped the cocoa carefully, letting it burn it’s thick chocolate taste into his tongue and down his throat. 

“Its taking after you too, my dear,” Aziraphale said. Then he scrunched up his nose a bit, “I don’t think I like calling it spawn. Are you sure that we can’t call it a child?”

“Have you ever seen or heard about what happens if an angel and a demon have offspring together?” Crowley meant the words to be a hiss. He had a very good mouth for hissing, and yet every syllable seemed to float right off his tongue. He spoke gently. He spoke with consideration.

And he hated it.

“Of course not. Nobody ever has. Angels don’t like demons. Demons don’t like angels. And neither typically have the necessary sex organs. We wouldn’t even have had them if Adam hadn’t given me such an anatomically correct penis and you hadn’t been in a hurry.” (Aziraphale clearly didn’t think much of the excuse of being rushed. Possibly because he had never once made a sex organ of his own. No, he had his given to him by the anti-Christ. It was easy to be dismissive of something you’d never done.) 

“So odds are we’ve created something worse than the anti-Christ and it’s very existence will be the key to the undoing of heaven, hell and earth.” Crowley was not going to admit that the cocoa was the most delicious thing that he had ever drank, but it felt like those words were emanating out of him nonetheless. 

Joy was filling up the shadowy corners of the bookshop. It was swelling into all the nooks and crannies. It was creeping up the staircase. It was knocking at the windows, seeping out into the street, making every poor bastard that walked past smile to himself for no reason at all. 

“It certainly doesn’t seem very dangerous,” Aziraphale said. 

This was one of those battles that Crowley wasn’t going to win. Rather than say another word, he set his empty mug on the table and cleared his throat to say, “I’m out of cocoa.”

“Would you like another?” Aziraphale asked with the most malicious grin ever seen on an angel’s face.

“Your spawn would,” Crowley said.

\--

Crowley and Aziraphale had shared an uncountable number of meals in the great stretch of time they had known one another. (Admittedly more of them in the more recent years.) It very often proceeded in the exact same way: Aziraphale ordered a generous number of items from the menu and savored them without shame. Crowley ordered a drink of some sort and sat opposite him squinting through his glasses at Aziraphale as if he were some sort of naughty peep show.

It had never been any other way.

Not until they found themselves opposite one another at a lovely breakfast place with Crowley staring hatefully at the powdered-sugar and whipped-cream covered French Toast. There was a little container of warm syrup to go on it that Aziraphale pushed very slowly toward Crowley’s dominant hand.

“This will kill me,” Crowley said with no hint of hyperbole. “This isn’t even  _ food _ , angel.”

Aziraphale had chosen a slightly more nutritious breakfast. “My dear, it was your idea to order it.”

“Not  _ my _ idea. It was your spawn’s doing.” He still hadn’t picked up a fork to begin eating. In fact, his deeply hateful staring at the sugary breakfast had started drawing the attention of other patrons and the waitstaff. All around him there seemed to be a great war of intentions. 

While their spawn (as Crowley insisted they call it) was full of love, and hunger, and desperately wanted to eat the sugar disaster sitting on the table. It’s innate goodness was leaching out into the air and creating a bubble of goodness that had made their waitress one of the most pleasant women Aziraphale had ever interacted with. But Crowley’s anger was like a great swelling knot of blackness, pushing against the goodness so that anything that went too near him was thrown suddenly into a cycle of moods and evil thoughts.

Aziraphale did not know how to proceed. Crowley had avoided him for two weeks after the cocoa incident. The only communication he’d offered was a daily text to indicate the Spawn was still living. (That was meant to be reassuring to Aziraphale, surely.) “Crowley,” he said softly.

Crowley looked up from sneering at the food that he’d ordered to look at Azirphale with the very same sneer. “I’ll eat this,” he said like it was meant to be an offer.

“Oh good.”

“To appease your spawn…”

“Now, just a moment…”

“But  _ only _ if we have sex.”

Aziraphale was left sputtering his way through a sudden flurry of outraged thoughts. His brain was jumping through hoops too separate from one another to be able to figure out what exactly he was most upset about. He was floundering for a handhold, searching for something to object to that could be said without drawing too much attention from other patrons, and the only thing that he could think through the storm was: “but there’s a child!”

“Spawn,” Crowley corrected.

“Spawn, child, it doesn’t matter what you call it. It is inside of you.”

“It’s not in my vagina, angel.”

A man at the table to the left coughed so suddenly and so hard that it sounded like he was going to perish. He took a moment to thump on his chest, and gulp down a whole cup full of water. 

“I know that,” Aziraphale hissed. “But it stands to reason that if you’ve got one in there, it’s possible that you could have more. We are not having sex when there’s the possibility that there could be more!”

The man to the left jumped out of his seat as if he’d been assaulted. He hurried away from the table in a great rush of movement.

Crowley frowned after him, but only for a matter of moments. “You could wear a condom, then. I’m serious, angel. Your spawn wants me to eat this. It wants me to eat this because of you, if you want to do what’s best for the spawn then we are going to have sex.”

Aziraphale scoffed. “You can’t hold yourself hostage.”

Crowley lifted an eyebrow like a challenge. 

“I refuse to be bullied.”

Crowley slid the glasses low enough that Aziraphale could see the steely resolve on his face and then he pushed two fingers against the plate in front of him and slowly slid it from his side of the table to the edge. When he was done, he picked up his mug of black coffee and sipped it.

\--

As far as Crowley was concerned, the worst mistake Heaven made was backing Aziraphale into a corner. The angel was soft (there was no denying that) but there was a line that one simply could not force Aziraphale to cross. 

(That line being whatever Aziraphale had decided he was not going to do. But also, very obviously, the destruction of the entire planet and all things living thereon.) 

Aziraphale also could not be rushed.

Crowley had drawn a line of his own. Aziraphale had accepted the line, and he’d sat across from that line and ate every single bite of the sugary monstrosity that the Spawn had been craving. 

Crowley didn’t need that sort of negativity in his life. There was enough negativity happening inside of his body that he didn’t see why he would need to be mocked by the angel who had created the problem to start with. No, he kept his distance and busied himself with important tasks like lounging on his favorite chair.

He terrorized his plants.

He took naps whenever it suited him.

It might have gone on forever, Crowley making circles around his home: drinking scorching hot black coffee in his kitchen, grumbling at his answering machine, answering telemarking calls just to make the employees cry, and in general seething in a stew of rage that came with the realization that he might actually give birth to the unexpected spawn before Aziraphale showed up to give in to his demands.

Time was relative, and Crowley hadn’t looked at his watch in days.

“Really, my dear,” Aziraphale shouted from the other side of an unlocked door, “I think it’s time we had a talk!”

Crowley sneered at his feet propped up on the desk in front of him. His fingers were all threaded together and pressed over the slight rise of his belly. Spawn wasn’t wriggling anymore, it wasn’t conveying its desires for sweets and cuddles. It wasn’t  _ craving _ anything as far as Crowley could tell. It was just laying inside of him. He pulled one hand off his gut to motion toward the door and all the locks flipped into place. 

Aziraphale gasped on the other side of the door. Not doubt he was mumbling to himself about the rudeness of demons. (That was just fine, Crowley smiled for the first time in days.) And then, without any warning, the angel was standing across the desk from him with a very put-upon frown. 

“I’m in no mood for you,” Crowley said.

“Yes,” Aziraphale said. He let a sack slip off his shoulder and set it on the table where it gaped open to reveal a great wealth of sweets. There was everything from little chocolates to cookies to jams to instant cocoa packets. “I’m afraid this has gone on too long, my dear. And it’s no longer a matter between you and I. There has been an increase in petty crime and traffic accidents all around your flat. The influence of evil and discontent is strongest when it’s closest to you but it is spreading.”

“So?” (What did he care if humans went around robbing one another and hitting one another with pipes and what not?)

“In the interest of not drawing undue attention to ourselves, I propose a compromise. As you can see, I’ve brought a variety of sweets--”

“I don’t want them.”

“--for you to sample.  _ Crowley _ ,” was the voice that Aziraphale used when he was quite finished being bullied. “This isn’t about  _ us _ . Now, neither of us planned or even thought it was possible to have a child but the facts are that we are going to have one. What sort of example will we be setting if we allow our unborn child to influence humans toward evil?”

“I don’t care if he does,” Crowley said as he pulled his feet off the desk. He rocked forward to get to his feet with every intention of leaving. “I’m a demon, evil is what we do.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale gasped with a scoff of disbelief. “You’re not nearly as evil as you’d like anyone to believe and it’s about time we both just acknowledge it and move on. The very worst you could consider yourself to be is mischievous. What’s happening outside right now is  _ real _ Evil, Crowley.”

“So?” Crowley slid his fingers into his pockets. “What’s the compromise, angel?”

“You find something that you can eat and I’ll…” Aziraphale stuttered over the next words like he hadn’t been the one to shove Crowley up against the wall in a coat closet and fuck him roughly. “And we can have sex.”

That was not a compromise. That was Aziraphale giving in to Crowley’s demands. Still, it was better not to point out what they both knew. 

“Sex first,” Crowley said.

“There are people beating one another with sticks outside,” Aziraphale snapped. 

“Oh fine.” Crowley shoved his hand into the bag and pulled out a packet of chocolates. He shoved half the whole package into his mouth at once. The taste melted into his mouth and seemed to spread through his whole body like a flickering light building to full brightness. By the time he swallowed it, the Spawn was glowing with joy. “Now you,” he said. 

“Yes, fine,” Aziraphale agreed. He reached into the bag to pull out a strip of condoms.

“Bring the rest of the chocolate with you,” Crowley instructed.

\--

Sex had not been, in Aziraphale’s brief personal experience, so quiet and so terribly polite. The only thing missing from the moment was a nice doily to lay beneath them on the bed. Crowley (who was pregnant) was stretched out on the bed in much the same alluring manner as always. He had kissed Aziraphale with the same eagerness and he had tasted like warm chocolate and bitter coffee. 

He felt the same when Aziraphale penetrated him. He made the same sounds when the thrusts jostled him on the bed. His hands rested on Aziraphale’s skin with the same tender affection.

It wasn’t Crowley that was making the whole affair painful and disorienting. It was how Aziraphale couldn’t seem to lean any closer to him. How he was caught between knowing how sturdy Crowley’s body really was and not knowing exactly how he felt about pressing the full thickness of his own body down onto Crowley’s.

If the child could convey its desire for sweets, and could act out with petty vengeance at being denied, it was entirely reasonable to think it had some level of consciousness. It could be extrapolated that it was  _ aware _ . Therefore it was  _ reasonable _ to think that it could feel Aziraphale movements.

“Angel,” Crowley said. He wrapped his arms around Aziraphale and rolled them both. 

Aziraphale was no more comfortable laying out on his bed than he had been braced over Crowley. “I think we should take an appropriate amount of time to really consider what we’re doing at the moment.”

Crowley’s hand lifted his cock so he could slide back down onto him. His head tipped back as his eyes fluttered closed. His body shuddered how it always did when it gripped him greedily. “I don’t think that’s necessary at all,” Crowley assured him. 

“It’s just that, don’t you think that we should examine the extent of our chil--”

“Spawn.”

“ _ Child _ ’s awareness of his surroundings? What if he knows-- What if he’s aware of what’s happ--”

Crowley was rocking back and forth with more intensity than Aziraphale had managed in this encounter. It shuddered through his body with a grateful groan as his skin slid with slick, sticky sounds. 

“Oh,  _ Crowley! _ ” Aziraphale gasped. He wrapped his hands around the demon’s skinny hips and held him just there. “Shouldn’t we consider the fact that if our child can be hungry for something he might have some awareness of his environment?”

“Yes, of course,” Crowley said soothingly. He wasn’t listening. “I’m a lovely environment for the spawn. Now, do your part, angel or this is going to take a very long time.”

“But the child must know that we’re--”

“Fucking?” Crowley suggested as he rocked back and forth regardless of Aziraphale’s loosening grip on him. He didn’t seem to find the dig of Aziraphale’s fingers to hinder him in anyway. If anything, it was making him wetter and the spreading blush on his neck darker. 

“ _ Making love _ ,” Aziraphale corrected.

“If the spawn knows, he doesn’t seem to care. Now, if you don’t  _ make love _ to me properly, you’ll be breaking our deal. Think of all those humans and their sticks, angel.”

“Fine.” Aziraphale loosened his hands entirely, slid them down Crowley’s legs so the demon had unimpeded freedom to move. “But I protest.”

\--

Crowley did not like the things that were happening to his body. This little fist of energy in his gut was spreading through him like long stringy tendrils. And it was  _ good _ . It was as unbearably  _ good _ as Aziraphale smiling at baby ducks. 

Never mind the physical changes that left him unable to wear his usual jeans. (Whether that offense could be blamed on the widening of his hips to accommodate the eventual need to birth the spawn or the start of a bump rounding out his belly couldn’t be identified.) Crowley could bear feeling like a stranger in his own body with mild discomfort but what he couldn’t bear was--

“Did you just hold the door for that lady?” Aziraphale asked. He was plastered to Crowley’s back because he’d rightfully assumed that they were just going to barge into the woman’s way. His voice was caught between plain shock and pride.

“If you say one word about it, I’ll never talk to you again.”

Aziraphale’s chuckle was precious. “That’s not a very demon thing to threaten. You’ll never talk to me again? That sounds like something I would say. It sounds like something I did say.”

People were smiling at Crowley. They were offering him flowers on the street for absolutely no reason at all. Children were staring at him with open adoration. Drivers were waving at him. Old women were telling him how handsome he was. 

_ Worse _ than that, Crowley was smiling back. He was wishing strangers good health. He was holding doors and thanking people. He was behaving the way Aziraphale did. He was oozing the same contentment and love.

Crowley had started to  _ smell _ like an angel. The way they used the smell, the way that they  _ ought _ to smell. Like warm vanilla, like fresh-washed clothes, like a newborn baby’s skin and sunshine on green grass. He smelled like comfort, and love, and safety. 

(Which wasn’t, by the by, how heaven smelled anymore. But that was another story entirely.)

“I can’t!” Crowley shouted at the door he was still holding open.

“Beg your pardon?” asked the lady who stopped short of coming through.

“Not you, of course you can go through,” Crowley said with enough genuine sweetness in his tone that anyone could have believed him. (He even believed himself, which was much more frightening than the humans believing it.) As soon as the woman was through he let go of the door and turned on his heels to go back to the Bentley where he planned to remain until the spawn was out of him.

“Crowley, you have to,” Aziraphale said in a panic. As if he had never considered there were alternatives to actually continuing on with the pregnancy. “It’s not so bad, doesn’t it feel good to be nice? You’ve always been ni--”

“I’m not nice, angel!” Crowley shouted at him. But he didn’t shove him into a wall and threaten him. He couldn’t even muster up enough negative energy to growl. He couldn’t think of a single foul thing to call Aziraphale. The best he could manage was to say angel with an implication of sarcasm. “I’ve never been! I shouldn’t be now! I am a  _ demon _ .”

“Not a very good one,” Aziraphale said. He seemed to realize that was the wrong thing to say because his fretting fingers went from gripping uselessly at one another to spread out in front of his body like he could stop an argument before I began. “I only mean, you don’t seem all that different to me. And by that I mean--I guess, I just mean to say--well, isn’t it obvious, Crowley? Of course I’ve always thought you were nice. Of course I’ve always felt that you had a certain soft spot for me. I love you,” was a regretful, uncertain whisper, but, “and you love me.”

Well that was said with some backbone.

“I’m not made for this, angel. I’m not supposed to smell like this. I’m not supposed to open doors! I’m not supposed to make people smile!”

As if proving a point, a woman with two small children walked past with a huge smile on her face as her little ones burst into song and started skipping.

“Happy children are good,” Aziraphale said with some desperation. “And it can’t be that much longer, can it? How long do pregnancies last? Certainly not longer than a few months. You’ll be right back to normal.”

“You’re an idiot!” Crowley shouted at him. 

Aziraphale didn’t even look offended to be insulted. (Maybe because it hadn’t sounded much like an insult.) “You can stay at the bookshop,” he offered in a hurry. “You can make the apartment upstairs any way you’d like it. You won’t have to leave if you don’t want to and you won’t have to worry that you’re doing any good in the world because you’ll be where I am.”

“So?”

“So, you won’t know if it’s me or you doing it,” Aziraphale assured him.

That wasn’t the same as undoing the good that Crowley was inflicting on the world, but it did give him plausible deniability if he ever met another demon in his life. “Fine,” he said very sweetly. “Go and get us breakfast. I’ll be in the Bentley.”

\--

A routine developed, and for a while, everything was wonderfully peaceful.

Sunrises were met with warm cups of steaming tea and delightful pastries. Long snuggles were had in the shockingly comfortable (if somewhat starkly made) bed Crowley had conjured. They unwrapped scores of little chocolate treats between them without making any mention of the obvious swelling of Crowley’s gut. (Aziraphale never mentioned anything about the kindness radiating from his lover either. No need to start that up again.)

They had a proper breakfast at the table by the improbably large window. Aziraphale dined on a variety of delicious possibilities and Crowley ate some variation on waffles. (Sometimes he ate toast slathered in butter and caked with brown sugar.) 

Sometimes, if the weather was nice and Aziraphale was in the mood for it, and there wasn’t anything more interesting to read or an auction where he might find more books or anything at all else in the world to look at, he opened the shop. 

On shop days, when he was feeling like being seen, Crowley wore loose black dresses and tastefully done-up sweaters and he milled around the shop dusting the shelves. 

They never stayed open later than lunch. Crowley didn’t eat lunch, but he laid against Aziraphale’s side on the downstairs couch while Aziraphale  _ attempted _ to eat. Sometimes he hummed, and sometimes he talked nonsense about sea creatures and out space.

They never went for walks anymore.

In fact, going out anywhere at all was absolutely out of the question. Outside was an unknown thing (regardless of how Aziraphale would be present and the pretense of pretending that the increasing level of goodwill in Soho had anything to do with him would still be present). 

Until very suddenly, right out of nowhere, a pleasant middle-aged woman with a pink blouse and a tan handbag ruined everything. She stopped by Crowley who had been pretending to dust something for the better part of ten minutes, and she smiled at him with such honest joy that no ill-intent could possibly have been meant. She said, “oh, congratulations. Aren’t babies the greatest gift?”

Crowley’s arm eased down from his continued attempt to pretend to clean. His other hand, always hovering around the now noticeable roundness of his waist, lifted up so the pair of them were crossed over his chest. He stood the way he had before, when he was almost always projecting an air of masculinity. And he snarled at the woman. “Baby?”

“Yes,” the woman said, “aren’t you expecting?”

“I’m afraid the shop’s closed!” Aziraphale shouted before any more assumptions could be made. He shooed them all out with the smallest of celestial pushes and locked the door behind them.

As far as Aziraphale was concerned, the fact that Crowley was  _ visibly _ pregnant really wasn’t worth mentioning because they were both quite aware that he was, in fact, pregnant. But Crowley pulled his dress up over his stomach and bunched it so it was laying across the bump. He turned sideways to assess his reflection in the window.

“Angel,” sounded like a lovely, lazy thought.

“Yes dear?”

“Why didn’t you tell me I was fat?”

“Well you aren’t, dear. You’re pregnant.”

“Pregnant!” Crowley shouted at him. “It’s really there! Look at that.” His hands were waving around his gut as if it weren’t already obvious enough. “There’s an actual living thing in there! It’s getting bigger--it’s getting a lot bigger--angel do you know what happens after it gets bigger?”

“It comes out?”

“It comes out!” Crowley grabbed the bottom of the dress and yanked it back down before turning in a swish of skirts and stomping up the stairs. “Out!” He shouted as he went. “Out! It comes out!”

Aziraphale cast a pitiful stare toward the door. He thought very seriously, and very, very briefly about making a run for it. Not that he was cowardly, but that he wasn’t certain what side he was meant to take in the temper tantrum that Crowley was certainly about to have. “Oh dear,” he whispered.

By the time he got upstairs, Crowley had conjured a suitcase (for effect) and was shoving wads of his clothing into it (for effect) as he muttered to himself (for effect). “And I don’t suppose you’ve got any idea what to do about this!”

“Well, I thought it just sort of came to you naturally. All...living things...do it?”

“Do it? Doing it is what got us into this mess, angel. We will not be ‘ _ doing it _ ’ ever again!”

“No! I meant giving birth. All sorts of animals do it with nobody to help them.”

“So your plan,” Crowley hissed (and for the first time in months, his hiss was a long drag like a snake’s tongue), “was to let it happen naturally?”

“Well,” Aziraphale tried. “What was your plan?”

It was important to note that the sky was no getting darker outside the windows but that the glass in the windows was getting darker in their panes. The sound of honking cars and shouting voices was audible over the rattling of the plants shivering in their pots. A great storm of anger was blossoming out of the room, crackling through the air like too much static energy. 

“What I meant to say,” Aziraphale said very loudly, before any further damage could be done, “was that--”

Very suddenly, as if conjured out of pure black fury, Crowley’s wings snapped into being. They fluttered up with aggravation and folded down at his back. He’d pulled his glasses off when Aziraphale started shouting so he could squint at him with the full effect of his wide-yellow snake eyes. 

“--that,” Aziraphale tried again, “that,” he was groping uselessly around the inside of his skull for anything that would help them resolve the situation. He was coming up empty on all accounts. 

There was a great crunch of metal outside, and the scream of rage from a man who must have ruined a new car. 

“Anathema!” Aziraphale shouted, “well, she’s a witch and that makes her an expert in all sorts of things. She’ll be able to help…”

“With the birthing of your demonic angel spawn?”

“The nun!” Aziraphale added. “She’ll be able to help the nun, the one that switched up the babies. The nuns know how to deliver babies, they know about Satan, and  _ you _ and Anathema knows about both of us, and occult forces and I’m sure they’ll both just be delighted to help us?”

Crowley straightened out of the wicked slant his anger pulled him into. He considered what Aziraphale had said and then, quite like nothing had happened at all, his wings fluttered and disappeared. The windows righted themselves and the growling evil dispersed. “Well, we’ll go see for ourselves?”


End file.
